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July 2010 Entries

Imagine we are awhile into the future. How do you get open source releases down to your project so that you can use them? How do you get the products down to your computer so that you can use them? Is it easier or harder than the way we’ve always done it before? The Past and Present Before we can go there, let’s look at what we do now (the past is really the same for us here). Let’s say I want to use NHibernate. What do I do? There are basically three paths we all follow in this process. 1. Never ......

In a previous post I mentioned how I was going to show you how UppercuT (UC) has the ability to make gems stupid simple to create and publish. You ask if gems can get any easier and to that I answer, “Why YES, they can!” How about just filling out the information for the gemspec, running a build and having a nice, shiny new gem ready for publishing? Rock The Gems Basically you want to get the latest release of UppercuT. You can download it or grab the source and compile. There are already instructions ......

There has been a lot of response in the community about this gems idea we’ve been talking about. I even had the opportunity to sit down with Nick Quaranto, the guy behind Rubygems.org, over coffee Sunday and talk about where we think we are going and what it will take to get there. One of the biggest things that everyone wants to see carrying this idea forward is that we migrate off of Rubygems.org and have our own gem server. And we all agree this is a great idea. There are just two things that ......

In my last post I didn’t mention dependencies. Dependencies are their own animal. They require a couple more things to be in place. Let’s talk about those things. In the .NET world, the dependency for compiled bits is usually an exact version of a reference. Let me explain. So for example, you have a reference to log4net, and you don’t ILMerge it into your assembly. You now have a dependency that the DLL needs to be there and a particular version (outside of redirecting the bindings). So what I’m ......

In my last post I showed gems being used for .NET. Now let’s talk about How. Most of this stuff I’ve learned over the past two days, so if I have a mistake here or you have a better idea, please don’t hesitate to offer a better solution. The GemSpec The Gem::Specification reference is your friend. In order to create a gem, you need to define a gem specification, commonly called a “gemspec”. A gemspec consists of several attributes. Some of these are required; most of them are optional. From here ......

The Ruby community has enjoyed a great user experience with a package management system they use called Gems. A gem is a package (or a library), compressed with some additional metadata, and can be either source files or binaries. Let’s focus on binary gems. We have the same concept in .NET (DLLs/EXEs). You may have references to other DLLs. When you want to update a reference you are using on a project, you may also need to update its dependencies as well. And so on and so forth. A package management ......

I was recently pointed to an InfoQ article titled Do Story Points Relate to Complexity or Time? It mentions that some teams estimate by a matter of complexity versus how long in effort something will take. Mike Cohn, who wrote the original post It’s Effort, Not Complexity, makes some very good points into how people should estimate based on how much time a story will take to finish versus another story. Relative effort, not complexity. The argument here is that complexity should not matter if two ......